By Steve Cañón…
Just what do the tech giants and working remotely have to do with guns? With gun control? Plenty.
Many things about America will be forever changed as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Some of them have been good for those of us who care about gun rights, such has the hundreds of thousands of first-time gun buyers who have decided that owning a firearm and armed self-defense is an option they want.
But not all of the news is potentially good.
There have been a number of articles this last week on how the employees at many of California’s high tech giants are taking advantage of the Wuhan virus to lower their cost of living (and their exposure to COVID-19). Despite the tech companies’ ethos of giving people the ability to access everyone from anywhere, telecommuting in the industry has been relatively rare.
The very companies who are selling the ability to improve productivity via remote distributed services have, for the most part, kept their employees pretty much tied to their Silicon Valley office desks.
The Wuhan virus seems to be changing all of that.
“Why I’m Leaving San Francisco: Facebook Let Me” https://t.co/dLQs8E0kF8
— Nick Statt (@nickstatt) May 21, 2020
So if the tech giants’ employees no longer need to be in the office, they don’t have to be in California.
What does this have to do with gun control laws? The result of a more distributed Silicon Valley workforce would be a swarm of coastal exports spreading like locusts to much lower cost-of-living states in the great middle. As those coastal employees disburse, they will bring with them not only their technical prowess and incomes, but their culture and voting habits, too.
This could result in a blue wave overspilling the California border, funded and even encouraged by the high tech industry. In truth, it would actually be an acceleration of a slow-moving exodus that has already been long under way, with Golden State refugees fleeing astronomical real estate prices and confiscatory taxes.
A virus-driven acceleration of this emigration could overrun Second Amendment-friendly outposts, overwhelming bastions of “flyover country” that have, until now, represented the bulk of Second Amendment support.
From The Atlantic:
Western states taking in new Californians might be more anxious about change than they once were. Texas, for example, has been the most popular destination for outbound Californians for more than a decade, consistently averaging about 60,000 to 70,000 new Golden Staters per year. But now the state is at an inflection point, between its history as a ruby-red conservative stronghold and its future as a more mixed state with blue metros and red rural areas. In this context, the next SoCal family that U-Hauls into North Texas isn’t just some nice couple with different taste in barbecue; instead, they’re potentially the demographic straw that breaks the GOP’s back.
That was written in January, pre-pandemic.
The 2016 and 2018 elections proved there are more Democrat voters, than Republican voters. At least more who are willing to get out and vote. It was only because the blue states had such a high concentration of left-leaning voters that the 2016 Electoral College was an effective defense against a Clinton victory and what likely would have been more assaults on gun rights.
Now that companies have discovered that they can operate with their employees working from, well, anywhere, if the projected break-out of a significant number of California tech types happens, the politics and the nation may be irreversibly altered. And the result could be devastating for the right to keep and bear arms.
